A Farmer’s Life 
passages. ‘Let not ove of them escape!’ he 
would read, fiercely. He was so absorbed in his 
enjoyment that he quite forgot the people he was 
reading to. And we always laughed at him.” 
Then, after excitedly telling how he had bitten 
his tongue and made it bleed while eating 
pudding, the curate tried a new tack, exclaiming, 
“What a dreadful state the French are in... . 
They are so fickle. And it’s a curious thing: 
under the Romans a regiment of Gallic soldiers 
(and I suppose they were the ancestors of the 
present French) was placed between a regiment 
of Spaniards and one of some other race, because 
it was never certain whether they would fight or 
run away. And Julius Cesar, when he came to 
Britain, makes mention of the uncertainty of the 
Gauls. Now, Bishop Lightfoot says that the 
Galatians were a tribe of Gauls who had migrated 
from the east westwards—no, eastwards from the 
west—and if you remember, it is for their fickle- 
ness that the Galatians are blamed in the Bible. 
Isn’t that a curious thing?” 
From French fickleness he digressed to Zola’s 
The Downfall—* a wonderful book!” ; and from 
that again to an account of “‘ such fun” they had 
at Christmas. Did we know a game—kind of 
charade—you come into the room and aét the 
name of a book which the others have to guess? 
Well, at Christmas he had played that game; 
46 
